A Dead Man's Tale
by SongsofPsyche1945
Summary: Jack ends up in prison, this time maybe for good (OC alert, trigger warning:elements of non/con, self harm and violence)
1. Prologue

PROLOGUE:

I am a writer of stories.

I have waited a long time to write this one down, even though it happened almost twenty years ago. I am an old woman now. Now a days I sit in my garden, like I am now writing and writing and trying to get down every moment before it escapes my withering mind.

In the fall of 1732, I was the captain of the guard at Fort Palmera. I'm sure you have heard of it. Or maybe you havn't. I think it was destoryed in a hurricane some time ago. At that time it was unheard of a woman to be working, let alone working in a Fort that also was the largest penitentiary in the western Caribbean.

I worked on the Last Mile. Death Row. Davy's Jones Pickin'. Whatever you may want to call it. My father had died in a freak accident, and I had taken his place, much to the dislike of almost everybody at the fort. It took me nearly five years of hard work to gain their respect, and once I did, I was never second guessed.

Many have heard stories of Jack Sparrow, but not many have witnessed one as I have. Jack Sparrow is neither a hero nor a modest man and some may say he doesn't deserve to go into legend. This story is of Captain Jack Sparrow, the fall of thunderstorms. It reveals things of a sinister nature, the things that happened during the fall of 1732 were in no doubt some of the worst things I have ever come to witness.

This is not a happy story. This is a dead man's tale.

But I am a writer of stories, and this one needs to be told.

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	2. Chapter 2

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This happened in 1732, when the West India Trading Company ruled the Spanish main, and Fort Palmera was still one of the largest penitentiary of the Caribbean. The inmates made jokes about the gallows, the way people always make jokes about the things that frighten them but can't be gotten away with. They called it the Dancin' Rope, or the Last Man's Jig. They made cracks about men doing jumping jacks, and how the place was haunted by men doing the salsa cantina.

There was no "death row" at Fort Palmera, only the West Wing, set apart from the other four and about a quarter their size, brick instead of wood, with a horrible bare metal roof that glared in the summer sun like a delirious eyeball. Six cells inside, three on each side of a wide center aisle,

Each almost twice as big as the cells I the other four blocks. Singles too. Great accommodations for a prison, but the inmates would have traded for cells in any of the other four. Believe me, they would have traded.

The entire building was made of bricks, even the floor. It gave the illusion that the corridor was coated in blood. At the bottom was the restraint room. At the top end was a T-junction. A left turn meant life- if you called what went on in the sun baked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects. Thieves and arsonists and pirates, all talking their talk and walking their walk and making their little deals.

A right turn though-that was different. First you went into my office, and crossed in front of my desk, which was flanked by the British flag on the left and the West India Trading Company on the right. On the far side where two doors. One led into a small water closet that was solely for my use (one of the benefits of being the only woman guard); the other opened on a large tin shed. It was a small door—I had to duck my head when I went through, and it had dwarfed Jack Sparrow who was thinner and shorter than myself believe it or not. You came out on a little landing, then went down three cement steps to a board floor. It was a miserable roof with a metal roof, just like the one on the block to it was an adjunct.

Dead in the center of that miserable room were the gallows themselves, sitting up on a wooden platform. I don't know why our particular gallows were set inside, maybe it was to keep them from rotting in the sun, or quite possibly to deny a last glimpse of the sky to those condemned to swing.

There were four or five guards on the block each shift; Tom Lee, David, John, and Rick Jones. Most of them were honest, hardworking men. With the exception of Rick, who had earned the nickname "Rick the Dick" amongst the inmates (and the majority of the guards) because he was mean, and stupid. Rick had no business on the West Wing, where an ugly nature was useless and sometimes dangerous, but he was related to the governor by marriage, and so he stayed.

We had all been taken by surprise when the papers came in that they had finally caught the infamous pirate Jack Sparrow, who had all but illuded the West India Trading Company many times. Too many to count, actually. It was bit of a running joke amongst the guards, often one would say "yer more likely to catch Jack Sparrow than to win that wager, mate". On top of being caught, Jack Sparrow had actually committed a crime of the damed; the murder of that little boy. And he had a date with the hangman's noose.

I had prepared the wing as much as I could for our infamous pirate-now-convict, making sure that the restraint room (which had been used as a closet space before Jack Sparrow) was cleared out, and the cool down coat was hung neatly in my office. I had secured ankle and wrist restraints in the room (after I had received a very long letter from Lord Cutler Beckett about Sparrow with explicit instructions on how to handle Mr. Sparrow, I decided to take the suggested precautions), and had prepared a very strict yet clear welcome speech that left no room for questions. I may have been the only woman super in all of Fort Palmera, but I was not a stupid one.

I had managed to rise to the top of Fort Palmera, with the legacy of my father to protect me. He had died in a prison rally, and I had stepped in to take his place. We were on a small island in the middle of the western Caribbean. It would have taken six months for a new officer to arrive from England, and by then we probably would have all been dead. Persons of authority were hard to come by. The guards and prisoners had learned to respect me. Tom Lee, David, and John were all loyal. Rick on the other hand could be heard muttering for days, going on about how he refuses to take orders form "sum dumb lady who could be his mother".

I was young then, the twenty five years I had seen had been ones of hardship and heartbreak. The loss of my father had been a hard blow for me, he being the only family I had left. Eventually I would leave Fort Palmera, go on a get married and settle in Florida, but at that moment I was very much on my own. I must have been a sight back then, I had refused to wear a man's uniform instead insisting on a skirt and blouse—just to remind them exactly who I was. I kept my black curly hair up in a tight bun, instead of letting it fall in a cascade of curls as the other ladies did. Now looking back, the other ladies on the fort must have thought I was very odd, and that's probably why they avoided me. I really didn't care though. All I wanted was to save enough money to get passage on a ship so I could escape Fort Palmera and never come back. I was doing my time just as the inmates were, under different circumstance though, of course.

That was also the year I had been stupid enough to allow a Caribbean Recluse Spider to bite me. The silly creature had been hiding in my sleeve as I had pulled on my shirt one morning, and it had bitten me in the arm. The venom of a Recluse doesn't kill you all at once, instead it slowly decays the tissue around the bite until the victim either succumbs to infection or the affected area is cut away. It was not in my agenda to have my left arm cut off by the fort doctor, so I had gone to an apothecary instead. The medicine they gave me helped with stopping the venom, but it did nothing to stop the pain and smelled like death itself. The other guards respectful enough to simply smile and carry on their business, but I knew they could smell it. And in that unnatural October heat, it smelled like rotting flesh.

So it was on that day, woozy from the heat and the pain in my arm, that I had welcomed Captain Jack Sparrow onto the West Wing. It was on that day, that my life had changed forever.

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	3. Chapter 3

On the day Jack Sparrow arrived in the west wing, it was still unnaturally hot, even for the Caribbean. Thick thundercloud had spread across the sky, casting a dark grey light over the fort. I could almost feel the electricity of the rising storm in the air. It made it hard to breath.

It was Rick who was leading Sparrow through the fort and I could hear his shouts echoing throughout the quiet hallways.

I popped my head out of the cell I was sitting in and looked down the corridor at Tom Lee.

"What's he yelling about?" I asked

Tom Lee just shrugged, "Hell if I know."

"I don't like it."

"None of us do."

Then they were there, walking through the doorway and towards us. The first thing I saw was the large bruise on the man's cheekbone, like someone had backhanded him. Hard. And then I saw how tiny he was. I could practically see his ribs through his prison uniform. His long disheveled rag tag hair was pulled back into a messy bun, with a red scarf holding it back. He wore chains on his arms and leg irons on his ankles that sounded like cascading coins as it ran along the corridor between the cells. Rick was on one side of him, David was on the other and they looked like giants walking along with a captured gerbil. There was something odd about him, all the stories and legends I had heard about the infamous Jack Sparrows had seemed to be false. This man standing in front of me couldn't have been the captain of the Black Pearl, he couldn't have fought the kraken or escaped from the world's end. Even from my point in the cell I could see that he was shaking from head to toe. His eyes were cast at the floor, and every time Rick would shout I could see him flinch. I knew immediately that this was not good. Not good at all.

"Pirate! Pirate! We've got a pirate here, destined for the gallows!" Rick shouted, tugging on the chains harder than necessary and walking with his chest puffed out, as if escorted Jack Sparrow was the most important job in the world. David didn't say anything, but he look embarrassed.

"Pirate-."

"That'll be enough of that," I said.

That morning I had had quite a lot of trouble with the spider bite on my arm (the medicine made me gag so hard I had vomited, and it had stung so badly I had nearly passed out), which resulted in an uncommon stiffness in my wrist and fingers. I had wrapped the wound tightly after applying the medicine and strung my left arm in a sling. The experience had left me fatigued and grumpy.

I—as I did will all of the inmates that came to West Wing- was there to welcome him and take charge of him, but I had no idea what to expect until I saw him. The three of them stopped outside the cell door, which was standing open on it's track. I nodded to David, who said "Are you sure you want to be in there with him, Ma'am?" He had witnessed my battle with the bite this morning, and had suggested that I pay a visit to the fort doctor, which I declined politely.

"Am I going to have any trouble with you, Mr. Sparrow?" I asked, sitting there on the bunk and trying not look or sound as miserable as I felt.

Sparrow shook his head slowly—once to the left, once to the right, then back to dead center. He never looked at me. Not once.

"Okay. Bring him inside."

Rick gave him a harsh shove, and the man would have toppled over if it hadn't been for David holding his other arm. Once he was inside the cell, David and Rick stepped out. Sparrow stayed exactly in the place they had put him, staring at a spot on the ground.

Rick grinned at me through the bars, his eyes cold and hard. He was tapping his pistol against the bars in the way a man does when he has a toy he was eager to use. And all at once I couldn't stand to have him there. Maybe it was the unseasonable heat, or the painful throbbing in my left arm, maybe it was knowing that the West India Trading Company had sent me an infamous pirate to execute and Rick clearly wanted to rough him a up bit first. Probably it was all those things. Whatever it was I stopped caring about his political connections for a little while.

"Rick" I said, "They're moving the canons over to the east side."

"Arnie Hustle' in charge of that-"

"I know he is," I said "Go help him"

"That isn't my job," Rick said, "Captain Jack Sparrow is my job."

"Then you job is done." I said "Get over there.."

His lower lip pooched out. Arnie Hustle and his men were moving the canons, and boxes and what not over to the newly refurbished east side. It was hot as blazes over there, with work that involved lots of heavy lifting.

"They got all the men they need," he said.

"Then get over there and start shouting orders at them." I said, my voice deepening to a dangerous level. They all knew and feared that tone of voice. I saw David wince, but paid no attention. If the governor ordered the Warden to fire me for ruffling the wrong set of feathers, who was he going to put in my place? Rick? It was a joke.

"I really don't care what you do, Rick, as long as you get the hell out of here."

For a moment, I thought he was going to stick around, and then there would be real trouble. Then Rick rammed his pistol into it's holster and went stalking up the corridor, making sure to slam the door behind him as he left.

After a few beats of silence, I turned back to Sparrow.

"If I let David take those chains off you, are you going to behave?"

He nodded his head once.

I nodded to David, who came in and unlocked the chains. I had a speech prepared for Sparrow, but I hesitated with him because he just seemed so...so... distant, as if he wasn't even aware that he was alive, let alone in prison. It had bothered me a little bit that we had been in each other's presence for more than ten minutes and Sparrow hadn't uttered a word. Which was a direct opposition from what Beckett's letter had said ("It will take all the worldly armies, both the alive ones and those of the undead to get this man to shut up for a single minute").

"Are you with us, Mr. Sparrow?" I asked

Sparrow had jumped a little, as if my voice had jolted him out of some far off world that only his eyes could see.

He gave me another nod.

"Can you speak?" I asked briskly.

"Yes, Ma'am" came the immediate reply.

"Good. My name is Theodora Bailey" I said "I am in charge here at the west wing. Sergio over there calls me Miss Bailey, others call me Dean Bailey. If I'm not here, ask this other man—his name is Mr. David. Do you understand?"

Sparrow just nodded.

"If you behave, you'll eat on time, you'll never see the solitary cell down at the far end cell down at the far end. Any questions?"

Again, Sparrow shook his head, eyes somewhat vacant, they stared over my shoulder into nothing.

I stepped back out into the corridor, making sure not to turn my back to him. Then I motioned for David to close the cell doors. They closed with a bang, and as I watched Sparrow I saw him jump, then wince at the sound.

I nodded my head, "Welcome to the west wing, Mr. Sparrow."

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